One day last summer, federal scientists using the fisheries and oceans library on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula saw a dumpster on the grounds filled with hundreds of research books and periodicals to be destroyed.

“A lot of employees were really shocked,” says Sylvain Guimont, who witnessed the scene and is an official with one of the unions representing federal environment workers. “There’s a concern that research will be lost forever.”

Guimont was seeing the winding down of the Fisheries and Oceans Canada library in Mont-Joli, one of seven such branches the federal government has moved quickly to close. Their internationally renowned collections have been transferred to the two federal aquatic libraries that remain, in Sidney, B.C., and in Dartmouth, N.S.

Federal scientists complain that the decision to close the libraries was made without consultation. “The people who use this research don’t have any say in what is being saved or tossed aside,” says Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, which represents federal scientists.

Tales of a shambolic “weeding” process, where books and documents deemed unnecessary were given away or trashed, have heightened fears that crucial environmental data will no longer be available to scientists.

“It’s a travesty,” says Alain Sinclair, a federal fisheries scientist who retired four years ago and a former member of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, the body mandated by federal law to advise the government on species at risk.

“It’s a real blow to the ability of people to do research,” he added in a phone interview from B.C.

Scientists see the closings as the latest hit to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, in charge of protecting Canada’s water and fish. Almost $80 million is to be taken out of its budget in 2014-2015.

Staff and research programs have been cut by a Conservative government focused on eliminating budget deficits and widely accused of placing resource development ahead of environmental protection.

“This is a government’s attempt … to do away with any of the evidence that might counter its political ideology,” Daviau charges. In a recent poll of her members, many scientists complained of being “muzzled” by Ottawa and of political interference in scientific work.

Gail Shea, minister of fisheries and oceans, accuses critics of spreading “serious misinformation.” Her department insists there will be “no changes to the size or scope of the collection.”

In a statement emailed to the Star by her spokesperson, Shea said no more than a dozen nonemployees visited each library annually. And more than 95 per cent of documents provided to users were done so over the Internet.

“It’s not fair to taxpayers to make them pay for libraries that so few people actually used,” Shea says, explaining the government’s main reason for consolidating the collections. The closings will save $443,000 in 2014-2015, according to government estimates.

But Kelly Whelan-Enns, lead researcher with Manitoba Wildlands, an environment protection group based in Winnipeg, sees the closings as a government bid to limit criticism of controversial plans, including pipelines to expand oilsands production in Alberta.

“If you restrict public access to information on fresh water by closing libraries, then you limit people’s ability to understand the environmental impact that kind of industrial development will have,” he says.

The libraries targeted were in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, Quebec, Manitoba and B.C. The shutdowns are all but complete. In a preliminary report last October, the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages asked the government to reconsider its decision to close the Mont-Joli library, the only French-language one in the country. Sophie Doucet, Shea’s spokesperson, says the government has not changed its mind.

In the final stages of the closing processes, DFO gave away material it says existed in more than one library. It was offered first to outside libraries, then DFO staff and lastly to the general public. Whatever remained was thrown out for recycling.

But scientists are not reassured.

“Because of the lack of transparency, we just don’t know how much is being saved,” says John Reynolds, professor of aquatic ecology at Simon Fraser University. “It certainly suggests a lack of respect for scientific information.

“Emails have been flying around among DFO staff saying, ‘Hey, all this stuff is about to go, come and grab it,” he adds. “I’ve seen photographs of classic books out of print for a long time, which have been salvaged by people because they were about to go.”

Days before Christmas, the public was invited to grab whatever was being left behind at the Eric Marshall Aquatic Research Library in Winnipeg. Whelan-Enns got there a few days after the free-for-all began.

““The materials were in complete disarray and just strewn about,” he says.

Up for grabs, he says, was research and materials that cost millions in taxpayer dollars to produce, including atlases, environmental assessments, studies on toxins in fish and decades-old “baseline” environmental data crucial for present-day comparisons.

Whelan-Enns and his colleagues carted away 30 boxes full of books and documents. He says library staff told him a consulting company drove away with a truckload of material.

Sinclair received several of the pictures dismayed fisheries scientists have been sharing. They include important works one DFO scientist grabbed from the library closed in St. John’s, N.L. Among them is a 10-volume set, funded by the federal government, called Fish Physiology. Sinclair described it as “seminal” research on the structure of fish conducted over decades in B.C.

“Anyone who works in fish diseases or on how they function in the wild — how they breathe, how they metabolize food — would be reading information from those texts,” Sinclair said, adding scientists have no idea if DFO has a copy.

Shea’s office said the minister was not available for an interview. In late December, as outrage over the library closings grew, her department posted answers to 19 questions online. It gave the total size of the print collection as 660,000 items. Some 30,000 departmental publications are available online and more documents are being digitized. But many books can’t be digitized due to copyright laws.

“The department may remove only content that is duplicated at one or more libraries and, in rare instances, materials which fall outside the subject disciplines pertinent to the department’s mandate,” says the DFO website, describing the material discarded from its collection.

In emails obtained by the Star, the DFO official in charge of closing the Mont-Joli library, Christine Lemay, describes the discarding process as “weeding.” The material in the dumpster, she writes, were periodicals the department has available online.

The department also promises to preserve and make available unpublished background material known as “grey literature.” That includes preliminary, statistical or technical reports, conference proceedings, notes from scientists, bibliographies and theses.

“This is something DFO paid a lot of attention to — to make sure that this kind of informal knowledge would be kept,” says Doucet, Shea’s spokesperson.

Scientists say there is no way of verifying such claims because, as one DFO researcher put it, “We’ve been kept pretty much in the dark.”

Who decides what material isn’t pertinent to the department’s mandate, they ask. Who verifies that only duplicates are being trashed or that “grey literature” — some of it a century old — is being preserved?

The biggest concern is the fate of unique, decades-old “baseline” research, Reynolds says. It includes everything from the temperature of oceans dating back decades, to surveys of plankton in the aquatic food chain, to the state of streams targeted for development.

A credible environmental assessment of the impact of the proposed pipeline from the Alberta oilsands to Kitimat in B.C., for example, would require historical information about the health of streams along its route, Reynolds notes. Is that information still available?

The sensible approach, he adds, would have been to give scientists a full inventory of the collection, have them decide what’s important, and then launch a massive digitizing effort — all before the libraries were closed.

A DFO scientist told the Star of recently trying to access several documents that were previously available in one of the closed libraries. They could not be found.

“They may be in the dump or in boxes waiting to be digitized, but they are not available to researchers,” says the scientist, who did not want to be identified.

Jennifer Hubbard, a science historian at Ryerson University, had a similar experience.

She’s editing a book on research conducted at DFO’s Biological Station in St. Andrews, N.B., where a library was closed. She used DFO’s online service to try to find “a couple of hundred” grey literature sources that were archived at that library. About 20 per cent of the material can’t be found online, and Hubbard has no idea if it still exists.

If it’s sitting in boxes in one of the consolidated libraries, who would know to ask for it unless they previously knew it existed? “Why would you destroy a library?” Hubbard asks.

Burton Ayles, a former director of science at DFO for the region covering the Great Lakes, the Prairies and the Arctic, says at the very least the government is making it harder for scientists to consult research.

No longer can scientists in Winnipeg, for instance, determine what books and material are appropriate for their research just by walking into the library and browsing. They now have to travel long distances or depend on time-consuming interlibrary loans.

The research, Ayles argues, “is effectively lost because it’s no longer accessible. It’s like stuff in your grandfather’s basement.”

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.